I started this newsletter in 2004, and it has come out erratically ever since. That’s because in the past, I have often come up with a “great topic” for an article and spent hours working on it before realizing it needed to be reconceived. By the time that happened, I had usually missed my deadline and ruled out that topic, at least for the time being.

In one memorable case, I spent 30 hours working on a book recommendation for Speed Cleaning by Jeff Campbell before concluding that the psycho-epistemological point I wanted to make was entirely my inference; it was not supported by the text of the book.

My first shot at a solution

To help me with this problem, I read book after book on writing. I wrote little note cards on everything I learned. I had a pack of them I would pull out and go through as I wrote an article. Every little bit helped.

Then in 2008, another article I was working on turned to dust after 10+ hours of work. I was beside myself. I marched into my husband’s office, throwing up my hands and saying, “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

In that moment I realized that I was “flailing,” a problem I discuss in my Thinking Tactics course. I saw I could use the solution I taught there. I looked at my husband and said, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to figure out the logical order of the steps.” He hadn’t said a word.

I marched back to my desk and created my Non-Fiction Writing Handbook (which is available in the Thinking Lab along with a course on the topic). I came up with 15 steps, in logical order:

1. Define a Selfish Purpose
2. Warm Up and Validate the Topic
3. Identify the Reader’s Context
4. Capture Your Intent with a Working Title
5. Name a Specific Theme
6. Flesh Out Content with Notes
7. Condense Notes onto Cards and then into Stacks
8. Select Points for the “Need to Know” List
9. Preview the Structure Using a Short Outline
10. Focus Attention with the Lead, Nut Graph, and Conclusion
11. Prepare to Draft with the 4-Column Outline
12. Draft from an Outline
13. Revise According to a Plan
14. Edit for Clarity
15. Polish to Add Impact

The mixed results

This identification was a major advance in my writing, and I found that I could often draft an article for this newsletter in a reasonable amount of time, say, 4–6 hours. I still discovered that my topic was off pretty often, but usually that happened within a couple of hours of work. That was a major improvement.

On the other hand, after preparing to write, my draft often got away from me. Many articles expanded into multiple parts. It seemed like when I chose a great topic, there were thousands of words I wanted to write on it. This meant writing was still an onerous undertaking. The newsletter still was erratic.

Conversely, during this time I was writing an update for the Thinking Lab once a week, never missing a week for 9 years. I was writing to a slightly different audience — people who see their own agency and their own control over their minds as the fundamental engine of their success. For that audience, I had a different standard. Often I sent musings rather than polished articles. I knew I could explain in class if something was confusing.

Over time, the quality of the TLab emails had gotten pretty high, so in 2017 I decided to send that writing to the general newsletter. I thought it would be a small shift. It wasn’t. I had higher standards for my public newsletter and I wasn’t willing to lower them. Although this change improved my consistency, I was still erratic.

The only time the newsletter came out regularly was during a halcyon period in 2019-2020 when I was able to hire a colleague who was between jobs. He helped me recycle old Thinking Lab articles so articles could appear weekly. But I never was able to keep up with a weekly pace with all new material.

It’s darkest before the dawn

Last year I doubled down on solving this longstanding problem. I enrolled in a high-powered speechwriting program, thinking that I was finally going to learn the secret I was missing.

The system included new ideas for identifying your target audience and your “core message,” and how to choose material to include in your outline and write the first draft. Though some of the advice was similar to tactics that had never worked for me, I was open to challenging all of my assumptions.

I slavishly followed their process. I spent hours, probably 80 hours, working on that script. My draft was poor, but I kept at it. I hired one of the writing coaches to help me improve it. Finally, over five months into it, I finally figured out what the problem was.

In trying to follow their process, I had dropped my own judgment of whether the thing hung together logically. I was judging it based on whether I was following their procedure, not on whether it made sense to me. This is the problem that arises from focusing on rules instead of reality. In hindsight, my 15-step process, though it has a lot of merit and brings a lot of clarity, also encouraged a rule-focused approach to writing.

This was my first glimmer into the fundamental problem that has distorted my process for years.

The key insight

At about the same time, I heard Peter Schwartz give a condensed overview of the writing process he taught me many years ago, and on which my writing process was based. (This was at last year’s Randsday Weekend Conference, at which we’ll both be speaking again in 2027.)

This time I heard him say, “You write because you have a message you want to communicate.”

This sounds obvious, but it hit me like a ton of bricks.

The first step of my writing process had been, “Define a selfish purpose.” In hindsight, my purpose in writing was often action-oriented rather than communication-oriented. I wanted my audience to buy a product. Or I wanted to persuade them to agree with me on something. Or I wanted to inspire them. Or I wanted to explain something for my own purposes and I just wanted the audience to receive it.

In other words, I often had an agenda when I was writing. I wasn’t just desiring to communicate. I was trying to get the audience to respond in a certain way. This created all kinds of writing problems because I would second-guess how people would react.

I realized I needed to start my writing process with a desire to communicate.

The full release from rules

So I started experimenting with a more ad hoc writing process, in which I began with a desire to communicate something and then muddled through on that, informed by my process but not wedded to it.

An interesting thing happened — I spontaneously started writing a different kind of outline. First I would create what my husband calls a “meta-outline,” which is just something simple stating the abstract purpose of each major section, such as:

• Attention
• Problem
• Solution
• Call to Action

(This article just has the story structure: Exposition, Inciting Incident, Rising Action, Climax, Denouement.)

A meta-outline is sufficient to see that the overall structure makes logical sense. Once I had it, I would flesh it out by writing to myself how I would follow it. It struck me that I had seen this kind of outline before in The Art of NonFiction. Ayn Rand’s outlines in that book read like terse instructions for how to present the ideas. They are not condensations of the articles, which is what I had been taught to do and had been slavishly trying to create.

It turns out that it is much easier to generate and write with an Ayn-Rand-style outline than the condensations I had been taught. Instructions to myself help me visualize how I will communicate my message. They keep me squarely focused on saying what I want to say to the audience, rather than trying to analyze the internal logic of the argument.

I now have a very simple writing process for these articles:

1. Name the approximate message I want to communicate.
2. Concretize it and differentiate it.
3. Identify any other information the particular audience will need filled in (such as their motivation for reading or background info).
4. Capture my intent with a working title.
5. Finalize the theme in under 15 words.
6. Make a meta-outline.
7. Flesh out the AR-style outline.
8. Draft in accordance with it.
9. Send it for proofing and queries.

The evidence of success

My final personal proof that this new approach works came this morning. I considered writing an article on “emotional homeostatis,” a term I coined in a class a couple of weeks ago while answering a question about happiness. I had printed out an AI-generated summary of my answer for reference. Looking at it, I thought, “Why don’t I just edit this? That will be fast.”

Wary, I decided to run it through my process. Within 15 minutes I realized I was not interested in communicating that message. Zero desire. The only reason I considered it is that I thought it would be easy. But writing is not easy if you don’t desire to communicate the message.

Your evidence that I solved my writing problem is that I sent out nine new articles in a row starting in late July. But if you paid close attention, you’ll notice I skipped the last two weeks. Why? Because I was only able to keep up that pace during the Labor Day Launch by working Saturdays. I finally put my foot down a couple of weeks ago. I need Saturdays to play tennis!

For the near future, you will get a new article every week that I don’t teach a class in the Thinking Lab. These two tasks take similar preparation, and doing only one or the other each week means I will have time for tennis and book writing.

You have no idea how thrilled I am to be able to plan on that.